crown and goal of nature is its highest outcome, man himself’; indeed, ‘the human will is, in a relative sense at least, a first cause’; moreover, ‘man is self-determined’. James and Bowne thus contribute to Mullins’s intoxication : Mullins’s Axioms and The were influential among Baptists. replaced Boyce’s Calvinistic system in 1917, remaining Southern’s authoritative theological text well into the 1950s. revised by ‘the venerable’ Herschel Hobbs, who collapsed all the axioms into ‘self-determination in every area of life’. Hobbs was instrumental in adding

doi:10.4324/9780203166505-119

Chapter

crown and goal of nature is its highest outcome, man himself’; indeed, ‘the human will is, in a relative sense at least, a first cause’; moreover, ‘man is self-determined’. James and Bowne thus contribute to Mullins’s intoxication

Chapter

ABSTRACT

American Baptist thought, both northern and southern, and even found some echoes in Britain.65

With the recent controversy over academic freedom in the SBC, the doctrine scaled new heights in the efforts of the moderate party to counteract formative tendencies. Failing in their use of scripture, they resorted to history for a theological foundation. The ‘historic’ distinctive of the believer-priest allowed a new publishing house, anachronistically named ‘Smyth & Helwys’, to be launched; their current catalogue offers half a dozen monographs on the subject. Following Mullins, and indeed taking him further along the path of a vacuous individualism, they speak of an historic Baptist position that has little to do with events prior to 1908. The Baptist convention of churches in Mullins’s home state, now led by a scholastic Mullinsite, recently created a Baptist Distinctives Committee devoted to maintaining the new theology, and is currently contemplating the creation of yet another fragmentary institution, the Convention of the Americas.